Welcome to the week.

And welcome to a new era of It’s Called Science!

In addition some gorgeous new illustrations and fancy formatting thanks to our friends at Tubik (the web developers behind most of the UI here), we’re kicking off a new format: one topic, real data, and our take on what it actually means in the context of our broader *Actually* Pro Life and What Can I Do ethos.

Why the change? I know a lot of you love the news roundup, and a smaller version still exists at the bottom of this email (you can also upgrade to an Important Membership to get access to our entire curated news feed)!

But in a world of AI summaries taking over inboxes, I really wanted to turn It’s Called Science into something that felt more true to the name: still responding to the news, but something more specific, useful, nuanced, actionable and rooted in real data that you can see with your own eyeballs. And this is the first iteration of that!

So, this week, we’re digging into water, and how we can keep it clean and flowing worldwide, from Mississippi to England to the Gambia.

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Let’s get into it!

— Willow

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A Mississippi court just ruled that Americans don’t have a constitutional right to safe drinking water (Mother Jones). A town 14 miles from Dallas has none at all (The 19th). Over in England, the water network is facing major strain under a sudden drought (Bloomberg), and Gambian rice farmers are losing fields to advancing saltwater (Mongabay).

Different countries, different symptoms, but the underlying story is the same.

Access to safe water still tracks almost entirely with income. Globally, 74% of people used safely managed drinking water in 2024, up from 68% in 2015. That’s progress for sure, but that still leaves roughly 2.1 billion people without it.

To close the gap between high and lower-middle-income countries, we need to seriously pick up the pace of progress to hit 2030 targets of universal access to safe drinking water.

That’s not to say that high-income countries are perfect either.

In the US, 31% of all active public water systems had at least one reported violation in 2024 and 7% had a health-based violation where an actual contamination was over the legal limit (for whatever that’s worth).

Those failures cluster around rural or small systems that serve 10,000 people or fewer. Nearly 50,000 small water systems exist nationwide, mostly in places with below average household income, running on customer bases too small to fund proper maintenance (like the town outside of Dallas).

We know which systems fail and why: they’re under-resourced, under-maintained, sized for conditions that no longer hold.

We also know the fix: it’s not sexy or glamorous, it’s just sustained investment and planning for the world we’re actually in.

Infrastructure is always aging, everywhere. Maintaining reliable water access requires ongoing choices, that just aren’t being made in a lot of places, whether that shows up as a lead pipe in rural America, a drought-drained reservoir in England, or a rice paddy going saline in the Gambia.

Look, we can’t fix England’s drought or the Gambia’s coastline from here (not directly at least). But there is still a lot we can do to move the needle, especially here at home.

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Last week, we asked: Which disease is the leading cause of death worldwide?

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ HIV/AIDS (3%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Malaria (60%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Ischemic heart disease (29%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Stroke (8%)

The correct answer is ischemic heart disease. It’s been the leading cause of death for over two decades, well ahead of a single infectious disease. Malaria is a real, devastating killer, but it doesn’t come close to heart disease’s global death toll.

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— Willow

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